A decade ago, Philadelphia’s outdated sewer system—like much of the nation’s infrastructure—was crumbling, causing a nasty brew of storm-water, raw sewage, and pollutants to flow directly into local waterways. But the cash-strapped metropolis, home to over 1.5 million people, couldn’t afford to build a new system. So the city decided to think small—and local, and cooperative—to construct something big and different. The city rolled out its “Green City Clean Waters” plan in 2011: a 25-year effort to let residents take the lead in creating a web of small interconnected “green” infrastructure projects like roadside plantings, green roofs, porous pavements, street trees, and rain gardens.

Thinking local—and integrating social engagement into systems planning—means reimagining infrastructure as we know it. The key to the “Green City Clean Waters” plan was building layers of community engagement and partnerships over technical and governance systems. Now and for the next twenty years, schools and libraries will teach kids about water with hands-on active learning projects like rain gardens, while the city enforces requirements for the replacement of non-porous surfaces, offers funding and support for neighborhood initiatives, and streamlines bureaucratic procedures to facilitate their approval and success.

Related Story

Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address pointed out, once again, the abysmal condition of the nation’s infrastructure (the American Society of Civil Engineers gives it a D+). Yet unusually for these discussions, Obama talked not just about waterways, transportation, and energy infrastructure, but also broadband. His solutions combined the standard way that our country has approached communications infrastructure since the mid-20th century—relaxing regulations to encourage the incumbent service providers, like Comcast and Verizon, to build it out—with newer ideas, such as public-private partnerships and municipal fiber. All of these solutions together, he said, would “enable communities to succeed in our digital economy.”

Could Philadelphia’s approach to infrastructure hold some lessons for other systems—especially for broadband, which is by its nature distributed and interconnected? Although Obama did talk about lifting restrictions that prevent many local governments from building their own municipal networks (like the ones in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and in Lafayette, Louisiana), he didn’t talk about one model that holds the best hope for replicating Philly’s water success for broadband: community networking.

Community networks are bottom-up, grassroots projects set up by tech enthusiasts and local groups that care about digital access and community choice. They take all kinds of forms, from wireless mesh in neighborhoods to huge hybrid networks blanketing whole regions with a combination of DIY “microtrenched” fiber, so-called air fiber, and different kinds of wireless nodes.

One reason community networks don’t get discussed much is that there aren’t very many in this country. There are a few that have been around for a long time, like the Seattle Community Network with about 500 users, and newer networks that are growing fast, like WasabiNet in St. Louis and the Kansas City Freedom Network.

In the US, community networks struggle with challenges from internet service providers (ISPs). In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when standards for wireless devices operating on so-called “unlicensed” WiFi frequencies were released, a number of community networking efforts sprung up only to die on the vine. Some of them, like Wireless Philadelphia, tried to partner with municipalities only to be slapped down by the incumbent ISPs, which argued that government-provided broadband service amounted to an unfair market advantage.

By contrast, it’s in Europe where community networking has really blossomed. For example, guifi.net is one of the largest networks. It’s over a decade old with about 60,000 users across Catalonia and is now growing into other countries. The Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (AWMN) is also over a decade old, with about 5,000 users.

While American local networking communities continue to grapple with challenges from ISPs and reluctant municipal and federal partners—along with a general lack of support and awareness—the European Commission has initiated multiple research-based and prototyping efforts to understand and support community networks. While some European networks failed or were replaced by revenue-generating municipal projects, like Paris-SansFils, others have gone on to flourish as lively communities for technical and socioeconomic exploration. In some cases, such as AWMN’s new rural partner Sarantaporo.gr, these networks are producing new models for local economic development and governance.

Because community networks are non-centralized, they carry less risk of wide-spread failure in an emergency.

guifi.net, for example, operates on a wholly different business and service provision model than, say, Verizon does. Subscribers do not pay for bandwidth, but rather donate on a voluntary basis to the guifi foundation.

Local businesses, ranging from tech companies to TV repair shops, learn how to set up network nodes, harness the foundation’s bandwidth, and set up service contracts with local users. Local governments occasionally kick-start the process by donating space on a hilltop for a big bandwidth pipeline to serve the area, or with a bit of start-up funding. Money does not flow to a big telecom conglomerate, but to entrepreneurs and start-ups who do maintenance, troubleshooting, and computer help for local users, including local schools and community groups.

Community networks like guifi can provide STEM learning opportunities, drive local economic development, and enable governments to engage in increasing digital access in light-touch ways. Because they are non-centralized, they also carry less risk of wide-spread failure in an emergency. While big networks are often subject to cascading failures (as was the case during Katrina, Sandy, the Boston Marathon bombing, and every other major disaster in recent years), smaller, more distributed networks can keep going, especially if they are built using renewable and redundant power sources.

Many U.S. cities are currently thinking about how to increase digital access and economic opportunity for the 27 percent of Americans who do not currently have broadband access in their homes. Because they are hybrid technical-social systems, community networks suggest one way to think about how we could build resilient infrastructure more cooperatively, with the engagement and leadership of local groups, without relying simply on corporate return on investment or government budgeting and planning as the only methods for providing universal communications access.

Here’s something else Obama didn’t say in his speech last week: We have a choice to make about broadband infrastructure. We could go down a path of centralized municipal control or privatization that could lead to an outcome like Detroit’s water department bankruptcy or Bolivia’s water uprisings. Or we could follow a path like Philly did with its water system, which has eased the city’s woes by incorporating local communities into building multiple, interconnected, distributed solutions. Already, the city has reduced the amount of stormwater flowing through its sewers by 80-90 percent, simply by stopping rain where it falls and allowing it to filter back into the ground.

It’s great that Obama is talking about municipal broadband. Now is also a great time to think about the different kinds of roles a local government can play in creating community-led networks: not necessarily as a utility provider, but as a collaborative partner that supports existing projects and coordinates multiple local capacities and resources.

Most Popular

The special counsel indicted the Russian nationals and three Russian entities for allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election, the Department of Justice announced Friday.

On Friday, February 16, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosentein announced that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, had indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities on charges that including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and aggravated identity theft. This is the full text of that indictment.

Students have mourned and rallied the public after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High that left 17 dead.

Something was different about the mass shooting this week in Parkland, Florida, in which 14 students and three adults were killed.

It was not only the death toll. The mass murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High became the deadliest high-school shooting in American history (edging out Columbine, which killed 13 in 1999).

What made Parkland different were the people who stepped forward to describe it. High-school students—the survivors of the calamity themselves—became the voice of the tragedy. Tweets that were widely reported as coming from the students expressed grief for the victims, pushed against false reports, and demanded accountability.

Outrage mobs are chipping away at democracy, one meaningless debate at a time.

The mob was unusually vociferous, even for Twitter. After the California-born ice skater Mirai Nagasu became the first American woman to land a triple axel at the Olympics, the New York Times writer Bari Weiss commented “Immigrants: They get the job done.”

What followed that innocuous tweet was one of the sillier, manufactured controversies I have ever seen on Twitter. Twitter’s socially conscious denizens probably only realized they should be outraged at Weiss after they saw other people being outraged, as is so often the case. Outside of Twitter, some of Weiss’s Times colleagues were also offended by the tweet—and even hurt by it. The critics’objection was that Nagasu isn’t herself an immigrant, but rather the child of immigrants, and so calling her one was an example of “perpetual othering.”

The company’s unusual offer—to give employees up to $5,000 for leaving—may actually be a way to get them to stay longer.

On Monday, Amazon reportedly began a series of rare layoffs at its headquarters in Seattle, cutting several hundred corporate employees. But this week, something quite different is happening at the company’s warehouses and customer-service centers across the country: Amazon will politely ask its “associates”—full-time and part-time hourly employees—if they’d prefer to quit. And if they do, Amazon will pay them as much as $5,000 for walking out the door.

Officially called “The Offer,” this proposition is, according to Amazon, a way to encourage unhappy employees to move on. “We believe staying somewhere you don’t want to be isn’t healthy for our employees or for the company,” Ashley Robinson, an Amazon spokesperson, wrote to me in an email. The amount full-time employees get offered ranges from $2,000 to $5,000, and depends on how long they have been at the company; if they take the money, they agree to never work for Amazon again. (The idea for all this originated at Zappos, the online shoe retailer that Amazon bought in 2009.)

The clear goal of the special counsel is to speak to the American public about the seriousness of Russian interference.

With yet another blockbuster indictment (why is it always on a Friday afternoon?), Special Counsel Robert Mueller has, once again, upended Washington. And this time, it is possible that his efforts may have a wider effect outside the Beltway.

For those following the matter, there has been little doubt that Russian citizens attempted to interfere with the American presidential election. The American intelligence agencies publicized that conclusion more than a year ago in a report issued in January 2017, and it has stood by the analysis whenever it has been questioned. But some in the country have doubted the assertion—asking for evidence of interference that was not forthcoming.

Now the evidence has been laid out in painful detail by the special counsel. If any significant fraction of what is alleged in the latest indictment is true (and we should, of course, remind ourselves that an indictment is just an allegation—not proof), then this tale is a stunning condemnation of Russian activity. A Russian organization with hundreds of employees and a budget of millions of dollars is said to have systematically engaged in an effort (code named “Project Lakhta”) to undermine the integrity of the election and, perhaps more importantly, to have attempted to influence the election to benefit then-candidate Donald Trump. Among the allegations, the Russians:

In February 2011, Swiss citizens voted in a referendum that called for a national gun registry and for firearms owned by members of the military to be stored in public arsenals.

“It is a question of trust between the state and the citizen. The citizen is not just a citizen, he is also a soldier,” Hermann Suter, who at the time was vice president of the Swiss gun-rights group Pro Tell, told the BBC then. “The gun at home is the best way to avoid dictatorships—only dictators take arms away from the citizens.”

Apparently many of his fellow Swiss agreed. The referendum was easily defeated. Gun ownership in the countryhas deep historic roots and it is tied to mandatory military service for Swiss men between the ages of 18 and 34. Traditionally, soldiers were allowed to keep their weapons at home in order to defend against conquering armies. These fears came close to being realized during the Franco-Prussian War on 1871; as well as World War I, when the Swiss border was threatened; and World War II, when the country feared a Nazi invasion.

Tech analysts are prone to predicting utopia or dystopia. They’re worse at imagining the side effects of a firm's success.

The U.S economy is in the midst of a wrenching technological transformation that is fundamentally changing the way people sleep, work, eat, shop, love, read, and interact.

At least, that’s one interpretation.

A second story of this age of technological transformation says that it’s mostly a facade—that the last 30 years have been a productivity bust and little has changed in everyday life, aside from the way everyone reads and watches videos. People wanted flying cars and got Netflix binges instead.

Let’s call these the Disrupt Story and the Dud Story of technology. When a new company, app, or platform emerges, it’s common for analysts to divide into camps—Disrupt vs. Dud—with some yelping that the new thing will change everything and others yawning with the expectation that traditionalism will win out.

Leggings and yoga gear are common sights at practice rinks. But in competition, gender-coded costumes still prevail.

Last weekend, one of the buzzier stories out of the Olympic ladies’ figure skating short program competition was one you might call … surprisingly surprising. The French figure skater Maé-Bérénice Méité made headlines: for the fact that she skated to a Beyoncé medley, and even more so, for the fact that she did it in pants.

More accurately, she did it in a bedazzled black unitard, but that didn’t stop news outlets and viewers on Twitter from pointing out Méité’s eye-catching, subtly subversive pants. “This French figure skater may not have won a medal, but her pants took people's choice,” raved Yahoo! News, and AOL named Méité’s bodysuit to its list of “most dazzling figure skating outfits” of these Olympic Games.

Like it or not, the middle class became global citizens through consumerism—and they did so at the mall.

“Okay, we’ll see you in two-and-a-half hours,” the clerk tells me, taking the iPhone from my hand. I’m at the Apple Store, availing myself of a cheap smartphone battery replacement, an offer the company made after taking heat for deliberately slowing down devices. A test run by a young woman typing at a feverish, unnatural pace on an iPad confirms that mine desperately needed the swap. As she typed, I panicked. What will I do in the mall for so long, and without a phone? How far the mall has fallen that I rack my brain for something to do here.

The Apple Store captures everything I don’t like about today’s mall. A trip here is never easy—the place is packed and chaotic, even on weekdays. It runs by its own private logic, cashier and help desks replaced by roving youths in seasonally changing, colored T-shirts holding iPads, directing traffic.

The director Ryan Coogler's addition to the Marvel pantheon is a superb genre film—and quite a bit more.

Note: Although this review avoids plot spoilers, it does discuss the thematic elements of the film at some length.

After an animated introduction to the fictional African kingdom of Wakanda, Black Panther opens in Oakland in 1992. This may seem an odd choice, but it is in fact quite apt. The film’s director, Ryan Coogler, got his start in the city, having been born there in 1986. His filmmaking career has its roots there, too, as it was the setting for his debut feature, Fruitvale Station.

A bunch of schoolboys (a fictionalized young Coogler perhaps among them) play pickup hoops on a court with a milk-crate basket. But in the tall apartment building above them two black radicals are plotting a robbery. There’s a knock on the door and one of the men looks through the peephole: “Two Grace Jones–lookin’ chicks—with spears!” I won’t recount the rest of the scene, except to note that the commingling of two very different iterations of the term “Black Panther”—the comic-book hero and the revolutionary organization, ironically established just months apart in 1966—is in no way accidental, and it will inform everything that follows.